Elias, Norbert, and Dunning, Eric. Quest for Excitement

Among the major contemporary sociologists, Norbert Elias is unusual. He believes in the importance of historical perspective, shuns quantitative analysis, and has written extensively on sports. His magnum opus, Ueber den Prozess der Zivilisation, was originally published in 1939, generally ignored, republished in 1969, and translated into English in 1978 as The Civilizing Process. There are few references to sports in this two-volume work, but Elias has written a number of essays, some of them in collaboration with Eric Dunning, in which the basic argument of The Civilizing Process is applied to the field of sports studies. Since many of these essays appeared in German books and periodicals or in English journals not widely circulated in this country, American scholars should be delighted to have Quest for Excitement, which makes readily accessible the most important sports-related essays by Elias and Dunning. The value of the collection is enhanced by a preface (Dunning) and a long introduction (Elias). The outlines of the theory are made clear. The emergence of the modern state, which claims a monopoly on the use of violence, in combination with the division of labor or what Elias prefers to call “the lengthening chains of interdependence,” which involve us all in necessary social interactions, has tended over the last several centuries to diminish the spontaneous expressive interpersonal violence characteristic of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and early modern times. Constrained both by the increased external power of the state and by internalized restraints (“conscience, ” “the super-ego”), modern men and women are much less likely than their ancestors to physically assault one another in outbursts of uncontrollable rage. We mask our emotions. The history of sports, therefore, reveals a progressive diminution of the level of violence. The mayhem of Medieval folkfootball becomes the closely regulated game of soccer; the spectator riots which sometimes attended eighteenth-century cricket games give way to the murmured approval of the onlookers at Lord’s, Needless to say, Elias and Dunning set forth a far more complex account of the civilizing process as it applies to sports. The first pair of reprinted essays, “The Quest for Excitement in Leisure” and “Leisure in the Spare-time Spectrum,” argue for an Aristotelian conception of leisure as an activity rather than as simple rest and relaxation. In a world characterized by routinization and